victimized somewhat by their stylistic deviance from a Youth Culture that found crushed velvet a bit inorganic.
Theirs was a eclectism held together by the guts of Todd's insane bird-man leads, and, like the Move, The Nazz were the finest and most forward looking assimilators of early sixties pop style and instrumental niftiness, but also like the Move their only notable success was with singles like "Hello It's Me" and then sporadically.
When the Nazz split, Todd migrated to New York relieved, but also suspicious of bands and uncertain as to his next move musically. He had formed the Nazz to play the guitar white tunes and
This post-Agnew, mid-Israeli war fall, Todd Rundgren is 25 years old, roughly two years older than John Lennon at the time of his Ed Sullivan debut. Todd is one of the hottest and most innovative producers in what even TIME has called the world's biggest entertainment industry and star complex, a lurex and satin ver sion of the fabled "independent" producer like Jimmy Miller of Richard Perry, his toothy grin and red-tipped shag belying his status as one of the best rock and roll executives to emerge from what we suppose in our decadent glee is a dying art.
Rundgren had helped bring to our attention to such previously unknown talents as Jesse Winchester, Sparks (Halfnelson), Mark Moogy Klingman, and The American Dream. He has helped Grand Funk, The New York Dolls, James Cotton, The Band, Fanny, Paul Butterfield, and Badfinger make the most of their fine reputations by administering tactful doses of technique and taste to their recordings.
Since the break-up of his first punkoid super-stock quartet, The Nazz, when he was forced to accept that he was more than possibly America's greatest lead guitarist, but a producer, composer, and arranger by default as well, Todd has released five solo albums, three hit singles "We Gotta Get You A Woman", "I Saw The Light", and "Hello It's Me" and undertaken three ambitious tours with his own act. The question is: Are you going to hold it against Todd Rundgren that he can do everything but actually sell his own records, that he considers running for President (in 1984) a likelihood, and that even though he has played almost every possible instrument on his last two albums, he still maintains, I'm not into music per Se.
Todd never was one to wear a flower in his hair but by 1967 and the birth of progressive rock, be felt enough the master of his own personal style to form The Nazz, the ultimate Anglo-American hybrid of trendiness and glistening musical flash,
get rich, but had ended by writing all of the material, doing most of the arranging, and discoved that production was not quite the professional mystery it had been cracked up to be.
He was signed as an artist to Albert Grossman's management firm, at the time busy guiding the fate of The Band and Janis Joplin. At first Todd was the flashy post-adolescent who hung around looking for something to do, but he took it into his head that he'd like to produce, and as Grossman was signing new talent all the time and a label deal was in the works, Rundgren had a wide field in which to conduct his early experiments. His first production was The American Dream.
As it happened Todd learned the basics of engineering as well as production during these American Dream days, since none of the engineers at the studio in which they were working knew how to run a 16-track board. Rather than go through